Firefox flirting with 20% of browser market

Mozilla's baby is hitting dizzy heights at the weekends

Mozilla's Forefox browser is now beating the 20 per cent mark – with a new report suggesting that it hit one fifth of all internet usage on several weekend days throughout October

Net Applications' data suggests that Firefox use peaked at a hugely impressive 21.8 per cent of market share in October on one day, with its weekly average topping 20 per cent for two separate weeks in the month.

Interestingly, Firefox use swells at weekends, presumably as more people use home machines rather than office computers which are often locked into Internet Explorer as a default browser.

Dominant

Microsoft's Internet Explorer has a huge advantage in the browser wars currently with 71 per cent market share, but its popularity appears to be on the wane, with the likes of Apple Safari, Opera and Google Chrome all competing along with Firefox.

Mozilla are already beta testing Firefox version 3.1, with Microsoft looking to release its next major update Internet Explorer 8 next year.

Google's arrival in the competitive browser market gave it more than a one per cent market share within days of launch, but that has now dipped backed down significantly.

But Firefox, it seems, is the major beneficiary of people's steady drift away from Microsoft's browser – leaving the Redmond company with some major work to do with IE8 if it is to stop the rot.